Sentara Halifax hospital construction to start in fall

Sentara Health will begin construction in the fall on a modern acute care hospital to replace the aging Sentara Halifax Regional Hospital in South Boston, with plans to open the facility in summer 2026, the Norfolk-based regional health care system announced Monday as it also released the first renderings of the replacement hospital.

The new facility will be about 100,000 square feet, or about one-third the size of the existing hospital. Sentara, which expects to release more design and development details this spring, is building a new hospital instead of renovating the existing 70-plus-year-old building. It will be constructed where the Fuller Roberts Clinic is now, which incudes the green space behind the current hospital.

Halifax Regional Hospital’s patient volume has decreased in recent years due to a shrinking and aging local population, according to Sentara. Like many other hospitals serving rural areas, the facility has also faced physician recruitment and retention challenges. 

“The current hospital is over 70 years old with some very antiquated systems,” said Brian Zwoyer, the hospital’s president. “The plan right now will be to take that building down to allow us space for potential expansion in the future as well as access for our patients and visitors.”

He emphasized that in the current facility, there is a lot of unused space that can’t be used for patient care, so what Sentara is doing is transitioning and moving to a “much more effective space that still supports what we are currently doing … in a much more efficient and nimble facility.”

The new hospital will have inpatient medical, surgical, intensive care and observation beds, along with a cardiac catheterization suite, emergency department, operating rooms, a procedural room, helipad, imaging services, a laboratory, pathology, a pharmacy, rehabilitation space, respiratory therapy and other supporting departments, according to Sentara. However, it will not offer childbirth services due to a significant decrease in area births in recent years.

Services offered by the new hospital and local clinics will include anesthesiology, behavioral health, cardiology, cardiopulmonary rehabilitation, critical care, dentistry, emergency medicine, endocrinology, family medicine, gastroenterology, general surgery, gynecology, hematology/oncology, home health, hospice, infectious disease, infusion services, internal medicine, laboratory, nephrology, occupational medicine, orthopedics, pathology, pediatrics, pharmacy, pulmonology, radiology, rehabilitation, respiratory therapy and sleep study.

The new hospital will have 40 to 45 beds, with eight to 10 in the intensive care unit, Zwoyer said. The current 300,000-square-foot hospital is licensed for 192 beds. The new hospital will provide the same services the current one is providing, he said, but in a building with a smaller footprint and fewer infrastructure challenges. Zwoyer added that Sentara wants to increase and retain services at the new facility, while decreasing the number of patient transfers. There are no plans to eliminate any staff positions.

“Anytime you say, ‘Well, I’m building something smaller or we’re changing things,’ — and it’s hard, change comes hard — it can be … anxiety producing. So what we want to make sure [of] is that we are here for the community in the future. We want to build a facility that … has good access, that has great services. We have great outpatient services, and that, we’re going to be here for the next 50 years. Because that’s what the community needs.”